Monday, December 10, 2012

Amazing Exchange: Lew Rockwell Speaks Truth to a Government Apologist

Lew Rockwell writes:

The other day I had the honor of being on Ron Smith's show on WBAL in Baltimore. Ron has long been the radio voice of liberty in the Washington, D.C. area, and if Baltimore will excuse me for including them in that. If you think of the one place that needs Ron Smith, it's that area.

So, on Ron's show, I had a federal employee get very upset with me, and I thought you'd enjoy hearing our exchange.

Here's the key part of the exchange:

MOSSBURG: Lew and Ron, we have a caller who would like to speak about, in defense of the parasites, as he says.

(Laughter)

SMITH: OK.

MOSSBURG: Let's go to Bill.

How are you doing, Bill?

CALLER: OK. First of all, I'd like to wish Ron Smith the very best in this terrible battle against the illness that he has.

SMITH: I appreciate it.

CALLER: I disagree with Mr. Smith on most things, but I do wish him the very best, OK?

SMITH: Thank you.

CALLER: OK. Number two, I really take issue with Mr. Rockwell calling our government workers parasites. Now, in the first place, a lot of those government workers that are civilians, not even military, that work in our intelligence agencies, are one of the reasons that we got bin Laden. Some of those parasites that Mr. Rockwell has been labeling as people who do not contribute to our society, and that includes the TSA, are people who are quite arguably helping to protect his butt so he can get on your show and shoot his big mouth off. And I find his words disgraceful.

SMITH: Well, Lew, would you like to respond?

ROCKWELL: Well, we can know they're parasites because they earn their money by force. It's not like a voluntary market transaction where we can know that somebody is valuable. These guys put a gun to your head and say, pay up or you're going to jail; resist and we will kill you. That is the nature of the government. So the government is the one institution in society which claims and exercises the right to initiate violence against the innocent. And, of course, we're supposed to be thankful for this.

By the way, government employees, on average, at all levels, make double what the victim taxpayer makes. Double. These are our overlords. They live it up. They do relatively little work.

And as to our intelligence agencies, they're part of the whole Military-Industrial Complex that brought on 9/11 because we've been meddling in other people's countries for all these years, establishing dictators, overthrowing their governments, doing all kinds of horrendous torturing, killing, and, as I say, installing dictators, Mubarak, the Shah, all the bunch of them. It caused backlash. And so the rest of us in this country, who weren't part of the so-called intelligence agencies, suffered from what these people did to us.

As to the TSA, the idea that they should be able to feel you up, feel up your sexual organs to get on a plane, and even to take off your shoes – no civilized country in the world, by the way, makes you take off your shoes. This is an old CIA tactic to make you humiliated and to make you easy to control. It has nothing to do with security. This is all security theater.

One of the things about people who go into the government and rise to the top – and this is not everybody in the government. But the people who rise to the top like crushing others. They like putting their boot on your throat. They get a charge out of it. Some of them like killing people. They like bombing other countries. They get a kick out of it.

So do we want more of this kind of conduct in society or do we want less? Already, we have the biggest, most powerful, richest government in the history of the world by many magnitudes, the U.S. government. And, of course, now they're telling us, with their ridiculous super committee stuff, that, of course, we have to pay more taxes to them, let them be even richer and make us poorer.

The U.S. government is making every single American taxpayer poorer. And we should keep that in mind when they now are telling us they want more money, more power. They want you to be entirely naked before them, in every sense, to control you, to run your life, run your family, run your business, run your school, run your community. And you are just supposed to salute and say, yes, sir, here's my wallet, here's my child, here's my life. Uh-uh. A lot of us are now saying, no, we're not going to do it.

CALLER: May I just respond with just a couple of sentences?

SMITH: Sure.

MOSSBURG: Go ahead.

CALLER: So somehow, according to the great Mr. Rockwell –

(Laughter)

– we have a Gestapo totalitarian society with a jackboot on our throats, telling us that if we do not conform to the laws and the principles of the United States, we will be executed or maybe thrown into a 21st century-style Auschwitz. And the reason that 3,000 people got blown to pieces on 9/11 is because of the CIA and our other intelligence agencies.

ROCKWELL: You know, the U.S. government, by the way, just take the case of Iraq – killed a million people in this whole adventure in Iraq, a country that had never done anything to us. And overthrow a secular regime, which, of course, they're now doing it in Syria, too, so they can bring the Islamist fundamentalists to power to make more trouble, because empires love power. It gives them the reason to expand. The U.S. has got 900 military bases in other people's countries. We feel perfectly free to send in the predator drones and kill people. And we're supposed to think that doesn't cause a problem for us? That doesn't cause people to hate our guts?

Why don't we mind our own business? We've got plenty of problems in this country we need to worry about. We're in a depression. We need to worry about that. We cannot afford this empire. It's immoral. And it's only good for the Wolfowitzs and the Lockheeds and the Boeings.

SMITH: And it's failing. And it's failing.

ROCKWELL: Yes, that's right.

SMITH: And it's failing.

MOSSBURG: I think that's why, as we were talking about earlier, that Ron Paul's message is resonating so much now and that it will get the light of day because it's just imminent, and people feel it.

ROCKWELL: Well, we're supposed to be like this, take this gentleman's advice and just trust the government, give them everything, let them run us, because they've got our best interest at heart. You know what? No, they don't. This is a great myth. The government's got the government's interest at heart. They don't have the people's interest at heart. Their interest is to take all our money – (Laughing) – run our lives and make sure that we obey or otherwise put us in a cage. It's not Auschwitz, you know, but it's one of these massive numbers of government cages that exist in this country. They like to put you in a cage and it's horrendous. And they want to spray the pepper spray in your face and all the rest of it.

So are we supposed to think we need more of that conduct, or maybe do we need a slash – and that doesn't even begin to describe what needs to be done – to the government, especially the federal government, which, of course, also has the ambition to be the world government.

MOSSBURG: Well, you look at – I mean, you look throughout history and just at when movements take shape or take off, and it often takes decades and decades. I mean, earlier this year, I read Amazing Grace, about William Wilberforce ending the slave trade over in Britain and, I mean, this was this man's life-long quest. And, you know, it took 20 years on the first half to end the slave trade, and then many more to end slavery. So that's just one of those situations that shows that, politically, any issue can, even if it resonates with a lot of people, you need near collapse before it actually is taken seriously.

ROCKWELL: And let's not forget that slavery was a government institution.

MOSSBURG: Yes.

ROCKWELL: Made possible only by government. Because, of course, the slave runs away, the government catches them and sends them back.

MOSSBURG: Well, a huge tax interest as a result of the landowners who were making tons of money.

ROCKWELL: Yes. So, I mean, this is – and Auschwitz was a government institution, too. Remember when the gentleman was mentioning that? So I would argue the great enemy of mankind on earth, the state. And I think people are waking up. It has taken decades. But Ron Paul has been talking about this sort of thing since the middle 1970s, the early 1970s in public life, and he really has changed millions of minds. I mean, it's amazing. You know, when you wonder what one person can do, you just have to look at the life of Ron Paul, or I might add the life of Ron Smith, too. People can change huge numbers of minds, can change hearts, and can enlighten people so they're not going to put up with this anymore.

SMITH: Do you see that happening? Do you see that happening?

ROCKWELL: I do see it happening. I see it among the young.

SMITH: I thought that 2010 election was a watershed. Now, it may be reversed in 2012. We don't know.

Isn't it in Spain, Lew, where they – and in other nations, too, but Spain leaps to mind – they got rid of their conservative government and they've put in a liberal government. Now, they've gotten rid of their liberal government; they put in a conservative government. There is just widespread dissatisfaction with the rulers, no matter what party they identify with, no matter what ideology they profess.

ROCKWELL: Gary North quoted a Spanish voter the other day who said, well, we get to decide – in this election, we get to decide what sauce they're going to cook us in –

SMITH: Yes.

ROCKWELL: – but we don't get to decide whether we're going to be cooked.

(Laughter)

SMITH: Yes. He said we're going to get cooked anyway.

(Laughter)

ROCKWELL: Yes. So I don't think –

MOSSBURG: That's a great line.

ROCKWELL: I don't think we have to look to government to our salvation. People like you, Ron; people like Ron Paul; and all the good professors, and there are many of them; the good businessmen, and there are vast numbers of them; the good homemakers; workers all across this country, there's a huge surge of people beginning to think for themselves, not just accept Obama or Romney. Well, there are other things in life besides that spectrum, and I think especially among the young. So I have great hope for the future, even though I think the immediate future, we're going to have a lot of trouble.

MOSSBURG: Well, Lew, thank you very much for your time. It was great talking with you.

ROCKWELL: Well, thanks so much for listening to the Lew Rockwell Show today. Take a look at all the podcasts. There have been hundreds of them. There's a link on the upper right-hand corner of the LRC front page. Thank you.

Agreed! Love Lew- I think the (near) future textbooks will credit him (along Dr Ron) with singlehandedly shaping the future of the US, and the world.

His story about approaching Mises widow about the Mises Institute, and her delight as long as he pledged his life to running it, is one of the most wonderful things I've read. Without him, and Dr Ron, these things wouldn't be happening. Thousands of people that are waking up EVERY DAY due to their work...well, it brings a tear to my cynical eye.